Memory in the Dying

We find in a very old letter from a MASTER, written years ago to a member of the Theosophical Society,
the following suggestive lines on the mental state of a dying man:

"At the last moment, the whole life is reflected in
our memory and emerges from all the forgotten nooks and corners,
picture after picture, one event after the other.
The dying brain dislodges memory with a strong, supreme
impulse; and memory restores faithfully every impression
that has been entrusted to it during the period of the brain's
activity. That impression and thought which was the strongest,
naturally becomes the most vivid, and survives,
so to say, all the rest, which now vanish and disappear
for ever, but to reappear in Devachan. No man dies
insane or unconscious, as some physiologists assert.
Even a madman or one in a fit of delirium tremens willhave his instant of perfect lucidity at the moment of death,
though unable to say so to those present. The man may often
appear dead. Yet from the last pulsation, and between
the last throbbing of his heart and the moment when the last spark
of animal heat leaves the body, the brain thinks and
the EGO lives, in these few brief seconds,
his whole life over again. Speak in whispers, ye
who assist at a death-bed and find yourselves in the solemn presence
of Death. Especially have ye to keep quiet just after Death
has laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers
I say, lest you disturb the quiet ripple of thought and
hinder the busy work of the Past casting its reflection upon the
veil of the Future. . . ."

The above statement has been more than once strenuously opposed
by materialists; Biology and (Scientific) Psychology,
it was urged, were both against the idea, and while
the latter had no well demonstrated data to go upon in such a
hypothesis, the former dismissed the idea as an
empty "superstition." Meanwhile, even
biology is bound to progress, and this is what we learn
of its latest achievements. Dr. Ferré has
communicated quite recently to the Biological Society of Paris
a very curious note on the mental state of the dying, which
corroborates marvellously the above lines. For,
it is to the special phenomenon of life-reminiscences,
and that sudden re-emerging on the blank walls of memory,
from all its long neglected and forgotten "nooks and corners,"
of "picture after picture" that Dr. Ferré
draws the special attention of biologists.

We need notice but two among the numerous instances given by this
Scientist in his Rapport, to show how scientifically
correct are the teachings we receive from our Eastern Masters.

The first instance is that of a moribund consumptive whose disease
was developed in consequence of a spinal affection. Already
consciousness had left the man, when, recalled to
life by two successive injections of a gramme of ether,
the patient slightly lifted his head and began talking rapidly
in Flemish, a language no one around him, nor yet
himself, understood. Offered a pencil and a piece
of white cardboard, he wrote with great rapidity several
lines in that language  very correctly, as was ascertained
later on  fell back, and died. When translated  the
writing was found to refer to a very prosaic affair. He
had suddenly recollected, he wrote, that he owed
a certain man a sum of fifteen francs since 1868  hence more than
twenty years  and desired it to be paid.

But why write his last wish in Flemish? The defunct was a native
of Antwerp, but had left his country in childhood,
without ever knowing the language, and having passed all
his life in Paris, could speak and write only in French.
Evidently his returning consciousness, that last flash
of memory that displayed before him, as in a retrospective
panorama, all his life, even to the trifling fact
of his having borrowed twenty years back a few francs from a friend,
did not emanate from his physical brain alone, but
rather from his spiritual memory, that of the Higher
Ego (Manas or the re-incarnating individuality). The
fact of his speaking and writing Flemish, a language that
he had heard at a time of life when he could not yet speak himself,
is an additional proof. The EGOis almost omniscient in its immortal nature. For
indeed matter is nothing more than "the last degree and as
the shadow of existence," as Ravaisson, member
of the French Institute, tells us.

But to our second case.

Another patient, dying of pulmonary consumption and likewise
reanimated by an injection of ether, turned his head towards
his wife and rapidly said to her: "You cannot find
that pin now; all the floor has been renewed since then."
This was in reference to the loss of a scarf pin eighteen years
before, a fact so trifling that it had almost been forgotten,
but which had not failed to be revived in the last thought of
the dying man, who having expressed what he saw in words,
suddenly stopped and breathed his last. Thus any one of
the thousand little daily events, and accidents of a long
life would seem capable of being recalled to the flickering consciousness,
at the supreme moment of dissolution. A long life,
perhaps, lived over again in the space of one short second!

A third case may be noticed, which corroborates still more
strongly that assertion of Occultism which traces all such remembrances
to the thought-power of the individual, instead
of to that of the personal (lower) Ego. A young girl,
who had been a sleepwalker up to her twenty-second year,
performed during her hours of somnambulic sleep the most varied
functions of domestic life, of which she had no remembrance
upon awakening.

Among other psychic impulses that manifested themselves only during
her sleep, was a secretive tendency quite alien to her
waking state. During the latter she was open and frank
to a degree, and very careless of her personal property;
but in the somnambulic state she would take articles belonging
to herself or within her reach and hide them away with ingenious
cunning. This habit being known to her friends and relatives,
and two nurses, having been in attendance to watch her
actions during her night rambles for years, nothing disappeared
but what could be easily restored to its usual place. But
on one sultry night, the nurse falling asleep, the
young girl got up and went to her father's study. The latter,
a notary of fame, had been working till a late hour that
night. It was during a momentary absence from his room
that the somnambule entered, and deliberately possessed
herself of a will left open upon the desk, as also of a
sum of several thousand pounds in bonds and notes. These
she proceeded to hide in the hollow of two dummy pillars set up
in the library to match the solid ones, and stealing from
the room before her father's return, she regained her chamber
and bed without awakening the nurse who was still asleep in the
armchair.

The result was, that, as the nurse stoutly denied
that her young mistress had left the room, suspicion was
diverted from the real culprit and the money could not be recovered.
The loss of the will involved a law-suit which almost beggared
her father and entirely ruined his reputation, and the
family were reduced to great straits. About nine years
later the young girl who, during the previous seven years
had not been somnambulic, fell into a consumption of which
she ultimately died. Upon her death-bed. the veil
which had hung before her physical memory was raised; her
divine insight awakened; the pictures of her life came
streaming back before her inner eye; and among others she
saw the scene of her somnambulic robbery. Suddenly arousing
herself from the lethargy in which she had lain for several hours,
her face showed signs of some terrible emotion working within,
and she cried out "Ah! what have I done? . .
. It was I who took the will and the money . .
. Go search the dummy pillars in the library, I
have . . ." She never finished her sentence
for her very emotion killed her. But the search was made
and the will and money found within the oaken pillars as she had
said. What makes the case more strange is, that
these pillars were so high, that even by standing upon
a chair and with plenty of time at her disposal instead of only
a few moments, the somnambulist could not have reached
up and dropped the objects into the hollow columns. It
is to be noted, however, that ecstatics and convulsionists
(Vide the Convulsionnaires de St. Médard
et de Morizine) seem to possess an abnormal facility for climbing
blank walls and leaping even to the tops of trees.

Taking the facts as stated, would they not induce one to
believe that the somnambulic personage possesses an intelligence
and memory of its own apart from the physical memory of the waking
lower Self; and that it is the former which remembers in
articulo mortis, the body and physical senses in the
latter case ceasing to function, and the intelligence gradually
making its final escape through the avenue of psychic,
and last of all of spiritual consciousness? And why not? Even
materialistic science begins now to concede to psychology more
than one fact that would have vainly begged of it recognition
twenty years ago. "The real existence" Ravaisson
tells us, "the life of which every other life is but
an imperfect outline, a faint sketch, is that of
the Soul." That which the public in general calls
"soul," we speak of as the "reincarnating
Ego." "To be, is to live, and to
live is to will and think," says the French Scientist.1
But, if indeed the physical brain is of only a limited
area, the field for the containment of rapid flashes of
unlimited and infinite thought, neither will nor thought
can be said to be generated within it, even according
to materialistic Science, the impassable chasm between
matter and mind having been confessed both by Tyndall and many
others. The fact is that the human brain is simply the
canal between two planes  the psycho-spiritual and the material  through
which every abstract and metaphysical idea filters from the Manasic
down to the lower human consciousness. Therefore,
the ideas about the infinite and the absolute are not,
nor can they be, within our brain capacities.
They can be faithfully mirrored only by our Spiritual consciousness,
thence to be more or less faintly projected on to the tables of
our perceptions on this plane. Thus while the records of
even important events are often obliterated from our memory,
not the most trifling action of our lives can disappear from the
"Soul's" memory, because it is no MEMORY
for it, but an ever present reality on the plane which
lies outside our conceptions of space and time. "Man
is the measure of all things," said Aristotle;
and surely he did not mean by man, the form of flesh,
bones and muscles!

Of all the deep thinkers Edgard Quinet, the author of "Creation,"
expressed this idea the best. Speaking of man, full
of feelings and thoughts of which he has either no consciousness
at all, or which he feels only as dim and hazy impressions,
he shows that man realizes quite a small portion only of his moral
being. "The thoughts we think, but are unable
to define and formulate, once repelled, seek refuge
in the very root of our being." . .
. When chased by the persistent efforts of our will "they
retreat before it, still further, still deeper into  who
knows what  fibres, but wherein they remain to reign and
impress us unbidden and unknown to ourselves. . . ."

Yes; they become as imperceptible and as unreachable as
the vibrations of sound and colour when these surpass the normal
range. Unseen and eluding grasp, they yet work,
and thus lay the foundations of our future actions and thoughts,
and obtain mastery over us, though we may never think of
them and are often ignorant of their very being and presence.
Nowhere does Quinet, the great student of Nature,
seem more right in his observations than when speaking of the
mysteries with which we are all surrounded: "The mysteries
of neither earth nor heaven but those present in the marrow of
our bones, in our-brain cells, our nerves and fibres.
No need," he adds, "in order to search
for the unknown, to lose ourselves in the realm of the
stars, when here, near us and in us,rests the unreachable. As our world is mostly formed
of imperceptible beings which are the real constructors of its
continents, so likewise is man."

Verily so; since man is a bundle of obscure, and
to himself unconscious perceptions, of indefinite feelings
and misunderstood emotions, of ever-forgotten memories
and knowledge that becomes on the surface of his plane  ignorance.
Yet, while physical memory in a healthy living man
is often obscured, one fact crowding out another weaker
one, at the moment of the great change that man calls death  that
which we call "memory" seems to return to us in all
its vigour and freshness.

May this not be due as just said, simply to the fact that,
for a few seconds at least, our two memories (or rather
the two states, the highest and the lowest state,
of consciousness) blend together, thus forming one,
and that the dying being finds himself on a plane wherein there
is neither past nor future, but all is one present? Memory,
as we all know, is strongest with regard to its early associations,
then when the future man is only a child, and more of a
soul than of a body; and if memory is a part of our Soul,
then, as Thackeray has somewhere said, it must be
of necessity eternal. Scientists deny this; we,
Theosophists, affirm that it is so. They have for
what they hold but negative proofs; we have, to
support us, innumerable facts of the kind just instanced,
in the three cases described by us. The links of the chain
of cause and effect with relation to mind are, and must
ever remain a terra-incognita to the materialist.
For if they have already acquired a deep conviction that as Pope
says 

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain
Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain. . . .

 and that they are still unable to discover these chains,
how can they hope to unravel the mysteries of the higher,
Spiritual, Mind!